Monday, 22 January 2018

Just a week after catching up with Claus Guth’s staging at
the Staatsoper, I managed see the other staging of the work currently to be seen off
Unter den Linden in Berlin. The contrast could hardly be greater:
if Guth’s might be described as hyper-realist, Herbert Fritsch’s at the
Komische Oper is, well, maybe hyper-unrealist—it’s certainly hyper something.

The director, long a member a of Frank Castorf’s ensemble at
the Volksbühne, offers up a show that is undeniably stunning in its execution,
a gleeful mixture of the exaggerated and the anarchic, brilliantly realised by
an ensemble cast.

(click to enlarge)

In an elliptical interview in the programme, he offers what feels like a preemptory rebuke to anyone trying to define—or
judge—what he’s doing within traditional parameters. He talks of ‘freedom in
art’ not necessarily meaning that, to quote his own unstinting language, ‘I can
defecate here [on stage], or get undressed or masturbate there.’

Rather, he says, ‘freedom
in art means also the free appreciation of art.’ The audience should be allowed
this freedom too, he adds, ‘and therefore there’s no way that I’m going to tell
you what I’m planning or am going to do with my Don Giovanni production.’

It’s not easy to explain what he has done either, especially
for someone only very sketchily versed in the specific local theatrical
traditions that he calls on. In terms of the production as we see it, though,
the first shock comes in the apparent lack of the overture, displaced, it later
becomes clear, to burst onto the scene between the exit of Donna Anna and Don
Ottavio and the arrival of Donna Elvira.

At that point, too, the open space of the stage—empty but
for a bar heater—fills with lacy flats that bob gently about for most of the
rest of the evening; there are barely any props otherwise. Victoria Behr’s
costumes suggest Spain and the broader Spanish-speaking world, offering up a fair
amount of lurid, kitschy colours.

Act 1’s stage musicians appear in full Mariachi gear (they
return in incongruous white tie in Act 2). The chorus shuffle around in their
own colourful, over-the-top costumes with a mixture of skip and tiptoe. Lea-ann
Dunbar’s terrific Donna Anna, perhaps not entirely inappropriately, presents
us with parody of stock opera seria
gestures.

At the centre of it all there are unflinchingly concentrated
performances from Günter Papendell as Giovanni and Evan Hughes as Leporello:
the former played, together with grotesque make-up, smiles and grimaces, and
straggly blond wig à la Heath Ledger
as the Batman Joker; the later as
capaciously pantalooned semi-clown.

The energy they communicate together is irresistible: faces
in constant movement, their relationship with one another and the audience in
constant flux, recits (we heard Sabrina Zwach’s smart German translation)
delivered with sped-up objectivity one moment, leaden deliberateness the next.
Without such commitment and energy from the performers it would fall flat; here, though, it was impossible not to be drawn in and dragged along with it.

Inevitably, however, this sort of approach reveals only one
facet of the opera, and arguably only a small part of that facet. Caring about
any of these characters goes out of the window, while things become
increasingly problematic the further we get into the second act: this
Giovanni’s damnation—sinking into a hole in the stage beneath an illuminated
pointy hand—inevitably counts for very little.

I was also surprised that, like Guth’s production, Fritsch
had done away with the final sextet, which surely would have fitted, even
helped, his approach—although I fully concede that I might not have fully
understand the underlying aims of that approach.

I’d also have thought,
especially given the production’s fast-and-loose way with the score (several
numbers get stuttering false starts, for example, to underline the various
characters’ ineffectiveness), that the director would have opted for the
concision of the Prague version. we instead got what was essentially the
standard Prague-Vienna mix, conducted with verve by Anthony Bramall, in what can hardly be a straightforward assignment for a conductor.

This certainly isn’t one for purists, then, and clearly a
one-dimensional view of this multi-dimensional masterpiece. But in some ways a
staging every bit as compelling as Guth’s. They complement each other fascinatingly.

Sunday, 21 January 2018

The idea that Die
Zauberflöte is a ‘children’s opera’ is of course a ridiculous one, even if,
in many respects, it ends up being about children (an idea that was picked up
and developed in Goethe’s aborted attempt at a zweiter Teil). Nonetheless it seems—in Germany especially—often to be the first
opera children get to see, and it was certainly encouraging to hear the lobbies
of Staatsoper Hannover resound to the pitter-patter of teeny feet as local
children flooded the place for this second performance of Frank Hilbrich’s new
production.

Things didn’t get off to a good start when a technical
problem delayed the start by 20 minutes, but the centrality of children in the
production was immediately emphasised during the overture.

(click to enlarge)

Staged overtures usually, of course, inspire a fair amount of eye-rolling. Here it proves joyous and difficult to resist, however, as a group of
garishly attired kids on a revolve enthusiastically mime scraping and huffing
and puffing their way through the piece on a variety of instruments.

Before that, we had seen Tamino clamber into a bed far
downstage left. He then wakes up in his opening aria to grapple with a cuddly snake
subsequent torn to pieces by the three ladies.I wondered whether the whole
thing was being staged as his dream (the first subheading in a vaguely updated
synopsis in the programme suggested that might
have been the case) but if it was, it was hardly a fact that was made
obvious beyond that opening gambit.

There is consistency, however, in the way the central role of the children is further underlined when
the troupe of kids return to the stage each time the Three Boys (here three
girls) appear. At the end we even see Sarastro and his entourage—in stiff
plastic wigs and grey Bond-villain smocks—musicked into submission by them. This brotherhood clearly prefers a Land ohne Musik; in the Act 1 finale they dump instrument cases into a hole in the stage.

In an interview in the programme, Hilbrich (if I
understand him correctly) places music into a broader historical and societal
context when he argues that opera itself played a similar role for Germany,
especially during the country’s development during the 19th century, as music
does for the characters in Die
Zauberflöte.

And these ideas by themselves are far from bad. The problem is that the staging itself is messy and extremely poorly focused, throwing in far too many further
ideas that one struggles to keep track of, let alone unravel, interpret and
make any sense of.

Stefan Heyne’s set features a pointy-textured gold back wall and a central revolve with a cylinder that can be raised or lowered;
Julia Müer’s costumes mix austere greys with the garish and ghastly.

The whole
thing is as ugly as it sounds. The production’s tone, too, is unpredictable,
its occasional attempts to impose a dramatic realism distinctly jarring: a self-harming (I think) Queen of the Night, a particularly
handsy Monastatos and charred corpses revealed unzipped from body bags for the
trial by fire mingle uneasily with the celebration of joyful, exuberant youth we get elsewhere.

There wasn’t much good news musically either at this
performance, a fact clearly not helped by the (unannounced) replacement of the
first night’s Tamino and Papageno. Martin Homrich took over as Tamino and sang
with an impressive heroic voice which, though far from ideally controlled for
Mozart, could well be one to watch as it develops in bigger repertoire. Byung
Kweon Jun made an eminently likeable Papageno, but both he and Homrich
required a fair bit of help from an audible prompter.

Ania Vegry made a fine, moving Pamina, her performance
blossoming into an outstanding ‘Ach, ich fühl’s’. Dorothea Maria Marx offered a
very respectable Queen of the Night, able to negotiate the role’s stratospheric
demands cleanly. Tobias Schabel’s Sarastro (at one point removing his smock to
reveal Amfortas-like bandages) lacked vocal authority, but there was a
reassuringly sparky Papagena from Yiva Stenberg.

Her duet with Jun, though, was just one of several occasions
where pit and stage threatened to part ways. The conductor Valtteri Rauhalammi did
a good job of rectifying those errors, and there was certainly pleasure to be
derived from the playing of the orchestra, but such synchronisation issues and
scrappiness should never really have been happening in the first place.

Tuesday, 16 January 2018

It’s sobering to think that Claus Guth’s Don Giovanni is now a decade old. It was first unveiled in Salzburg in 2008, made it to the Staatsoper (im Schiller Theater) in Berlin in 2012 and has now made it to the Staatsoper (unter den Linden) as one of a first clutch of revivals in the renovated house.

This was the first time I’d seen the production in the flesh. It had bowled me over on Blu-ray (filmed at Salzburg), but critical reaction to it in the theatre had seemed a little more muted.

(click to enlarge)

Perhaps the staging’s cinematic nature—shades of Shallow Grave, Blood Simple and any number of films I dimly remember featuring holes dug in woods by the light of headlamps—made it especially effective on the screen, where the detail of the acting of Christopher Maltman’s Giovanni and, in particular, Erwin Schrott’s tic-addled, jittery Leporello could be shown in compelling close-up.

It seems the intensity and detail of the production has meant several principals have stuck with their roles over the years (in contrast to conveyor-belt one has seen in Covent Garden’s recent productions, for example), and it certainly feels unusual to find three veterans from Salzburg in the cast here.

Maltman’s Giovanni remains a dangerously compelling presence. He’s still in good shape, and the voice, which has tackled several larger roles in the interim, was probably the most authoritative and imposing on the stage.

It’s an impressive characterisation, even if he didn’t here quite manage the same hushed interiority he brought earlier to the Serenade, memorably staged as a touching reminiscence of earlier happiness—an idea pinched in at least one subsequent production that I’ve seen.

(click to enlarge)

Dorothea Röschmann, another Salzburg veteran, sings with her usual intensity and commitment as a Donna Elvira irresistible as characterisation if not as a character. Her state, very much as woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, is cleverly underlined throughout, not least when she first appears, impatiently checking a bus timetable, desperate to get on with a journey heading, one suspects, nowhere in particular. This Donna Elvira reflects the production itself brilliantly: everyone is stuck in the spinning forest of Christian Schmidt’s set, a space from which there’s no escape (and which would incidentally do excellent service in an especially nightmarish production of Hänsel und Gretel).

Some of the rest of the casting was a little less persuasive. Maria Bengtsson was stretched as Donna Anna, and though Mikhail Petrenko does a very good job as Leporello, he can’t quite match Schrott’s charisma in a characterisation tailored to the Uruguayan bass’s talents. Petrenko’s voice, moreover, is short on the buffo fruitiness and basic volume that the role requires. Jan Martiník’s gentle bass, similarly, is not ideally suited to the Commendatore’s granitic pronouncements.

I’ve admired Paolo Fanale in Mozart before—particularly in the Deutsche Oper’s Così fan Tutte last season—but he was also stretched here as Don Ottavio, the lovely openness of the voice often turning to rawness. Grigory Shkarupa unveiled a healthy bass voice as Masetto, while it was a luxury to have a Anna Prohaska bringing intelligence, subtlety and sparkle to Zerlina (she was the third of the Salzburg veterans).

She was not the only one, however, who seemed to be held back by Alessandro De Marchi’s conducting, which favoured lucidity above weight and drive, drawing playing from the Staatskapelle Berlin that was often short on dramatic thrust and fire—until the Supper Scene, at least. And in this production, of course, the Supper Scene is also the Final Scene, with the concluding sextet apparently deemed incompatible with Guth’s fiercely concentrated vision.

It’s a decision that raises all sorts of questions: a return to a 19th-century tradition that itself feels incompatible with certain aspects of the production—the lack of any visual response to the famous chords that announce the Commendatore’s arrival, for example—as well as the conducting, which certainly short-changed us here on big-r Romanticism. I’d not been too bothered by the omission on the small-screen, where the drama on the whole had felt more intense; here I was left feeling a great deal more unsatisfied.

Inevitably, too, the production itself has lost some of its striking contemporariness, as well as some of its sharpness, over the years. It remains in many ways, though, an exciting and superbly executed piece of theatre.

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About Me

I am freelance critic, writer and musicologist based in Berlin. I have held editorial posts at Gramophone and Opera, was opera critic of the Spectator and have worked as a critic for the Daily Telegraph and Financial Times. I was editor of 30-Second Opera (Ivy Press, 2015), now also available – when I checked last – in French, German and Spanish. My PhD (awarded from King's College London in early 2011) was a critical reassessment of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Die Frau ohne Schatten'; further details of my academic work can be found under 'Publications and Papers'.
If you'd like to email me, I can be reached on hugojeshirley[at]gmail.com.

About this Blog

Fatal Conclusions is designed to serve as a modest outlet for various reviews (of varying levels of formality and punctuality) and ideas regarding what's going on in the Opera and Classical Music worlds--and, if I'm feeling adventurous, beyond. Thanks for popping by. I hope you enjoy reading and please feel free to leave comments.